Digital Trends

The Acrobat community site, now in beta, allows users to create, collaborate on and share documents without using a single desktop application.

Joining the fray of online office applications that already includes the likes of Google Apps, Microsoft Office Live and smaller companies like Zoho, Adobe launched a beta version of Acrobat.com on Monday. Like its rivals, Acrobat.com will allow users to work online, collaborate with others, and share their finished works using Web 2.0 applications instead of traditional office software.

The site comprises of three basic utilities: Adobe Buzzword is a Web-based word processor that allows users to create and edit documents online or collaborate with others on them, Adobe ConnectNow is a Web conferencing service allowing users to share video, voice and even their desktops with colleagues, and outside of either application, users can share documents with others and convert them to PDFs. All are based on Adobe AIR technology, which the company developed especially for Web 2.0 apps.

Adobe compares the shift to sharing documents with Acrobat.com to the same type of shift initiated over a decade ago when users began sharing documents as e-mail attachments instead of on paper. “With rich Internet applications enabled by Adobe, we can combine desktop and cloud computing to create innovative productivity applications that will change the way we create, store and share documents together,” said Rob Tarkoff, Adobe’s vice president of business productivity solutions, in a statement.

Sign-up for Acrobat.com is free and can be done online immediately.